This isn`t my opinion, though I can agree with (1). I read it somewhere. Any comments?

(1) Who was Saddam, when he ruled Iraq?
Yes, he really was a tyrant, a person who could easily order to execute his political opponents... And so on, and on, and on...
By European standards, he can be called a "butcher", maybe, although he was quite soft for Asia. But it`s not the main thing.
Even if Saddam was a terrible dictator, who took an annual blood bath and gassed 100 Kurd kids before going to bed, he was a _secular_ ruler. Only during the war he started to use "Allah" for propagandist purposes.
Being in power, Saddam ruthlessly opressed radical islamists, and they were somehow "pacified" in Iraq.

(2) Who fights against USA/Britain in today`s Iraq? TV speaks about pro-Saddam remnats of the army, about his Tikrit clan.
But, really, Saddam is gone. He surely wasn`t the leader of this guerrila resistance.
Look at those few videos received from these guerrilas. They give oaths in Quaran, they praise Allah before their every action...
There are those people, who were actually opressed by the Saddam`s regime, who couldn`t hope to take the power.
Now they can. BAATH party is no more, US troops don`t really want to give their lives for some questionable ideals of "freedom for Iraquis". If these troops will be forced to leave, Iraq could become an another Afghanistan of the Talib times.

Instead of giving time to ruthless (simply because it`s impossible in other way) but secular regimes, that can secularize the whole society, having 100-200 years of peace, and evolve into something better, US wreaks havoc, breaking those thin attempts to ged rid of the islamic fundamentalism.
Is it a war against terrorism?

Saddam may have been ruthless but that's the only way to keep order in a contry like Iraq with so many racial, ethnic, tribal and religious devides.

As you say saddam was a secular leader who violently opposed the Islamists in his country now that he's gone these radical ellements are coming into the country to take advantage of the instabilty caused by the American invasion.

Democracy will never work in Iraq,another U.S backed strong man will have to take Saddam's place to insure access to the oil fields in the country which after all as we all know were the real reason behind this invasion in the first place.

If the media is to be believed,saddam ideologically speaking ,was stalinist/marxist the baath party being its arab equivalent ,saddam himself ,if media reports are to be believed was always a thug,in everything since he was a young man ,he did a hit on some opponent in his youth,and rose up through the ranks because of such behaviour,sounds more like a gangster to me, The war to get rid of him in the long run i believe will only hasten the rise of a shia islamic state in iraq.